Bart Cummings’s 12th Melbourne Cup victory with Viewed last year was itself enough to ensure a man officially and anecdotally acknowledged as a legend of Australian sport deserved strong consideration as Australia’s pre-eminent coach, with his ability to get the best from equine athletes surely comparable to the efforts extracted by those in other sports from two-legged beasts. In defiance of both Cummings’s age – 80 when Viewed saluted – and one of the imported horses whose patronage by race organisers he had often questioned, Viewed beat Bauer by a short half-head. But rather than bring down the curtain on one of the great careers in Australian sport, a 12th Melbourne Cup was merely the outcome of a life’s work still in progress. Cummings returned to win this year’s Caulfield Cup with Viewed and the Cox Plate with So You Think. Richard Hinds
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